Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Statistically Insignificant Listening

This morning I read an article in The New York Times entitled “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Opera.” This involved interviewing a diverse variety of subjects including both performers (not all of music) and critics. This turned out to be a follow-up to articles with the same title that concluded with “Classical Music” (September 6, 2018) and “the Piano” (April 19, 2019). Normally, I dismiss such exercises as opportunities for self-indulgence on the part of the interviewees. However, given that the “social world of music making” is currently under the “COVID-19 siege,” I found it interesting to view the content of the articles as a sampling (not necessarily statistically significant) of “audience impressions.”

On the positive side I was more than pleasantly surprised to see that one selection showed up on two lists. In the 2018 list pianist Daniil Trifonov selected “Le baiser de l'enfant-Jésus” (the kiss of the infant Jesus) from Olivier Messiaen’s suite Vingt Regards sur l'enfant-Jésus (twenty aspects of the infant Jesus). The following year it reappeared in the piano list, this time contributed by Times senior staff editor Joshua Barone. In both cases there was an audio clip of about five minutes (accounting for half the duration of the movement). The pianist for the Trifonov selection was John Ogdon, and that for Barone was Pierre-Laurent Aimard. There was no mention of the 1973 recording made by Yvonne Loriod, for whom the piece was composed.

Nevertheless, the selection definitely stood out in both lists. The 2018 list was particularly disconcerting, since in more cases than I would prefer to enumerate specifically, it seemed as if the choices had more to do with “what is trending,” rather than “what is memorable.” I also found it mildly ironic that conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen should choose the final movement from Maurice Ravel’s suite, Ma mère l'Oye (Mother Goose). This was written as a piano duet for two very young sisters (aged six and seven) and was only orchestrated about a year later. While I appreciate the sincerity of Salonen’s response to the orchestral version, my heart will always be with the original (particularly since I used to be able to play it)!

Then, of course, there was the “punch line” of the entire article in which Yuval Sharon recommended John Cage’s 4’33”. This was clearly more about Sharon than about Cage. However, I appreciate Sharon’s effort to call out the triviality of the entire exercise!

The rest of the 2019 list pretty much left me cold. Perhaps it served to reinforce my personal conviction that the experience of a concert performance will always trump even the best of recordings. Mind you, I have several recordings of that Messiaen suite (including the Loriod), as well as the score. However, at the end of the day, these serve as “mental road maps” that I can then consult when listening to the music being performed.

I suspect that the same rule of thumb applies to opera. Any “favorite musical moment” must still face the prospect of holding its own in a performance in which the context is established by not only the conductor but also the stage director. Thus, while I strongly sympathize with director Francesca Zambello’s selection of the final chorus of Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser, I still have to note that the music was brutally sapped of all impact by one of the worst stagings of this opera that I have ever experienced. I would prefer not to give any further details other than observing that Zambello was definitely not responsible for that particular staging!

More importantly, all three of these exercises, for the most part, involved pulling a listening experience out of context. There are any number of examples in the instrumental repertoire for which context can be disregarded without misconception. However, the presence of an overall narrative framework situates opera in an entirely different category of experiences.

In my teens I was hopelessly addicted to Mad, particularly where parodies were concerned. One of my earliest experiences was with the parody issue of Reader’s Digest (which I think was called “Reader’s Disgust”). As the title suggested, the Reader’s Digest mission was to distill articles down to “easily digested” summaries, allowing the reader to “get the point” in less time. However, there emerged a spin-off project that would provide abbreviated versions of entire novels. Mad decided to give Gone with the Wind (over 1000 pages long) the Reader’s Digest treatment, which amounted to only a few syllables for two utterances: “Fiddle-dee-dee!” and “BOOM!”

These seem to have been the seeds for my discontent with opera excerpts. I cannot dispute the impact of any of the selections. However, it is worth remembering that none of those selections mean very much to anyone that does not know the role they play in the overall narrative.

Exercise for the reader: Review all of the entries in the opera list. For each one, decide whether it is a “Fiddle-dee-dee!” moment or a “BOOM!” one. (Hint: It may be both!)

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